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Eric Raymond
Contributor agreements CA is "moeras padda" speak for "copyright assignment", that is who becomes the owner of proprietary opensource code. The root of the confusion over what is a very simple legal matter, you either have sole copyright or you don't, is that "license" is being used as dissimilar term for contract. With GPL3 every single project has entered into a stealth contract with Stallman: when he brings out GPL4 it will state that any contributing copyright holder to a GPL3 project, will be able to give Stallman a royalty free eternal license on such projects, enabling the FSF to license GPL3 code to any entity under terms that need not be disclosed. It will solidify US corporate control over essential ideas, like Redhat's proprietorship over the 'mount' command via GPL2, they are the sole copyright holders. It is this copyright or ownership that IBM purchased for millions, when it acquired Redhat. " ... http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8287 Every time a project says “we need you to sign a release before we’ll take your code”, it helps create a presumption that such releases are necessary – as opposed to the opposite theory, which is that the act of donating code to an open-source project constitutes in itself a voluntary cession of the project’s right to use it under terms implied by the open-source license of the project. ..." https://lwn.net/Articles/592503/ "... The assumption behind DCO (as explained by James in his talk, which I attended) is that the cases where a CLA protect you in a legal action are extremely rare. The more common case is not "the CLA protects you from legal liability" but rather "the CLA helps you figure out whose code to remove to clean up the mess afterwards". So he'd say that the correct question is not "has it been tested in a legal action" but rather "if a legal action happened, would it reliably allow identification and removal of problematic code"?As I said in the talk, I'm not 100% sure this is the right perspective/question to ask, but it is at least plausible and an interesting question to ask of CLA proponents. ..." http://harmonyagreements.org/ "...Project Harmony is a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software (FOSS). As a group, we represent a diverse collection of perspectives, experiences, communities, projects, non-profit and for-profit entities. In that diversity, we share a common belief in the future of FOSS, and a common interest in using our skills (whether they're legal, organizational, editorial, technical, or otherwise) to the benefit of collaborative FOSS communities. ..." forks http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928 RAYMOND proprietary forks: Is open-source development a more efficient system of software production than the closed-source system? I think the answer is probably “yes”, and that it follows the GNU GPL is probably doing us more harm than good If I choose the GPL, I can make you pay me for permission to make a proprietary fork. If I choose a permissive license, I can’t make you pay up. Seems like in that case, the GPL is the economically superior license . Doesn’t the GPL technically forbid proprietary forks? Even if it doesn’t, it seems to me that one person getting payouts to make a proprietary fork is a violation of the spirit and intent of everything the Free Software stands for. Given the internet uproars that tend to happen when things like that occur, i’d expect a proprietary fork bribe would result in a fractured community, a stagnant project and destroyed reputations. NOTES: SO Where IS the fairness? the gpl copyright holder can take all these code commits back which they don't have to ;publish and license it to the compnay nooboyd knosws about . In other words the GPL can emulate the BSD --------------------- http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html Consider, for example, Great Britain's "right" to control Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. It is difficult to explain Communist China's willingness to respect that right on legal grounds, given that, from the Maoist standpoint, neither the government of Britain nor previous, non-communist governments with which it had signed agreements were entities entitled to any moral respect. It seems equally difficult to explain it on legal grounds, given the general weakness of international law and the fact that for part of the period in question Great Britain (as a member state of the United Nations) was at war with China. An alternative explanation—that the Chinese government believed that British occupation of Hong Kong was in its own interest—seems inconsistent with the Chinese failure to renew the lease on the New Territories, due to expire in 1997. Category:GPL and BSD Category:Patents